Application Adventure: A Dad’s College Essay

Asked to come up with a mock title for a surefire best seller, the legendary publisher Bennett Cerf (1898-1971) is said to have replied, sticking a finger into the prevailing winds, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”

As far as I know, no one’s come up with a similarly incisive formula for placing an article on The New York Times’s most e-mailed list. But one way to appear there is to have something new — or smart, or furious, or funny — to say about college admissions and their attending agonies. It’s a topic that roils the collective gut.

The admissions process, as Andrew Ferguson puts it in his new book, “Crazy U,” entangles not just our pocketbooks but everything else that, besides world peace and cocktail hour, matters to parents: “our vanities, our social ambitions and class insecurities, and most profoundly our love and hopes for our children.”

Mr. Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, and he’s a valiant guide through this emotional territory. He’s got a big, beating heart, but he tucks it behind a dry prose style that owes a little bit to Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe — to name the first two white-suited writers who come to mind — and also to Dave Barry (who I suspect wears Dockers).

He made me laugh early, and often. Why do high school kids look so disoriented on SAT day? It’s not the test. It’s that their cellphones have been pried from their clammy fingers. “None of them had gone four hours without sending a text message,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “since middle school.”

Photo

Andrew FergusonCredit
Jack Shafer

“Crazy U” is a chronicle of Mr. Ferguson’s attempts to help place his son, who is 16 when this mini-odyssey begins, in a decent college. Mr. Ferguson’s boy (he is never named) is only an average student, and his father fears for him in a process that’s become a nationwide talent hunt favoring teenage extroverts and self-marketers. “I wasn’t sure,” he writes, “my son had the personality for it.” He means that as a compliment.

As this story moves forward, Mr. Ferguson makes short, shrewd detours into areas that include: the history of American education, how college guidebooks compile their rankings, the SAT tests and its critics, and the headache-making intricacies of college loans and financial aid. He talks to an expensive admissions guru who learns of his late start and fumbling progress and says, smiling: “Oooooh. Baaaaaaad Daaaaaad.”

These detours might have been, as they often are in memoirish surveys like this one, potted histories: breaded, deep-fried, dead on the palate. Mr. Ferguson’s taste buds are wide awake as he samples this material. His chapter on the SAT is a fine, provocative example. It may invite some flaming e-mail into his in-box.

He reminds us that the SAT was viewed, upon its introduction, as a liberal reform — a breakthrough for meritocracy, a way to jettison the old-boy network that fenced out minorities and nonlegacies. “The SAT was thought to democratize and objectify what would otherwise have been a chaotic and arbitrary process of selection open to favoritism and corruption,” he says.

The test, while imperfect, does a decent job of predicting a student’s grades in college, he notes. He takes seriously complaints that the test favors wealthier students. But he quotes one education professor who says, flatly, that for a million reasons — all of them unfair — it is “impossible to find a measure of academic achievement that is unrelated to family income.”

He agrees that more African-American and Hispanic students need to be enrolled in good colleges. But he is wary of those who would concoct tests simply to favor desired applicants. About one well-meaning psychologist who is attempting to do this, he writes warily, as if he were describing the experiments of Soviet-era scientists, “It’s a kind of reverse engineering: he knows the results he wants, he just needs the right test to give them to him.”

Photo

Credit
Patricia Wall/The New York Times

“Crazy U” is not, for the most part, political. You read this thing for Mr. Ferguson’s frazzled observations about every step of the process. He learns to fear “that feral look of parental ambition.” He observes the hypocritical way colleges pretend to loathe the guidebooks that rank them; yet if they get a good write-up, they “wave it around like a bride’s garter belt.” He disparages, tongue only slightly in cheek, “the poetry-writing ganja heads who slump out of Brown.”

He is bitterly funny about the (sometimes very) personal essays students are forced to include with their college applications. These essays are “a relatively new idea, and very baby boomerish,” he says. He asks: “Who are they to force a catharsis on 17-year-olds?”

Students who dislike talking about themselves, whose every sentence is not “a little stink bomb of braggadocio,” are at a disadvantage. “Once the larger culture considered reticence a virtue,” he writes. “Now it’s cause for suspicion or evidence of derangement.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Ferguson is a graduate of Occidental, a liberal arts college in Los Angeles. His son, after a few nail-biting moments, gets into an institution he likes, a big place that Mr. Ferguson refers to only as BSU, for big state university. His son seems to love it, even if his father is less sanguine. Mr. Ferguson describes BSU’s graceless dorm architecture this way: “DMV, Provo, Utah, 1972.”

Let me not overpraise “Crazy U.” But its slimness and modesty are what’s winning about it. It’s a calm, amusing, low-key meditation on a subject that is anything but calm, amusing or low key. Many parents will grip it, I suspect, as if it were a cold compress they might apply to their fevered foreheads.

Mr. Ferguson is the kind of father who fears — and maybe hopes a little too — that his son’s college years will “be as reckless, wasteful, and thrilling as mine.” Bad dad? No way.

CRAZY U

One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College

By Andrew Ferguson

228 pages. Simon & Schuster. $25.

A version of this review appears in print on March 4, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Application Adventure: A Dad’s College Essay. Today's Paper|Subscribe